BAILEY, John 1944-

PERSONAL: Born December 15, 1944.

ADDRESSES: Home—New South Wales, Australia. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Pan Macmillan Australia, Level 18, St Martin's Tower, 31 Market St., Sydney, New South Wales 2000, Australia.

CAREER: Writer and historian. Formerly a lawyer in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, a public servant in Papua-New Guinea, and an educator in England.

AWARDS, HONORS: Art Bachrach Literary Award, Historical Diving Society, New South Wales Premier's Award for Community and Regional History, and Western Australian Premier's Award for Nonfiction, all 2002, all for The White Divers of Broome.

WRITINGS:

The Wire Classroom, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1969.

The Moon Baby (science fiction), Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1972.

The White Divers of Broome: The True Story of a Fatal Experiment, Pan Macmillan Australia (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 2001.

The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans, Pan Macmillan Australia (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 2003, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: John Bailey's books The White Divers of Broome: The True Story of a Fatal Experiment and The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans both deal with historical racism, the former in early-twentieth-century Australia and the latter in the nineteenth-century American South. The White Divers of Broome were a group of twelve former members of the British Royal Navy who became pearl divers in Broome, a small town in northwestern Australia. In that area, the dangerous work of pearl diving had formerly been done by "expendable" Japanese, Malaysians, and other Asians, but the "White Australia" policy of the time made this use of Asian labor problematic. European-descended Australians, fearful of Asian workers taking "their" jobs and "diluting" the "pure" white race, demanded that these foreign workers be removed and all jobs, even the most dangerous, be held by white laborers. The White Divers of Broome "offers a wonderful insight into a panic-ridden nation," the judges declared in awarding Bailey the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Nonfiction, as quoted on the State Library of Western Australia Web site.

The Lost German Slave Girl takes up a legal case that grabbed the attention of much of Southern America at the time, but has since been nearly forgotten. The story begins with a group of Germans who immigrated to the United States in 1818. One young immigrant, Salome Muller, was orphaned soon after the group arrived, and the child was lost to her surviving relatives. Twenty-five years later, members of the Schuber family, Salome's relatives, saw a young woman in New Orleans who bore a striking resemblance to Salome's late mother Dorothea. The woman also bore birthmarks exactly like those Salome had had. However, the girl said that her name was Sally Miller and that she was a slave, the property of cabaret owner Louis Belmonti. The Schubers believed that "Sally"'s former owner, John Fitz Miller, had illegally and, in that strictly race-stratified society, disgracefully forced the white orphan into slavery; Miller and others claimed that Sally was indeed a light-skinned mulatto slave, and that she was merely manipulating the Schubers and the legal system to gain her freedom. Bailey examines both possibilities in this "dogged dissection of one of the most ornate and convoluted legal cases ever played out in an American slave state," as a Kirkus Reviews contributor described the book. But the book is more than just a dry unraveling of the facts; as Library Journal contributor Elizabeth Morris noted, Bailey "weaves a deft and captivating plot" out of the story.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 15, 2004, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans, p. 536.

Entertainment Weekly, January 21, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of The Lost German Slave Girl, p. 94.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2004, review of The Lost German Slave Girl, p. 844.

Library Journal, December 1, 2004, Elizabeth Morris, review of The Lost German Slave Girl, p. 134.

Publishers Weekly, October 11, 2004, review of The Lost German Slave Girl, p. 63.

School Library Journal, March, 2005, Kathy Tewell, review of The Lost German Slave Girl, p. 243.

ONLINE

All Info About Web site, http://crime.allinfoabout.com/ (May 6, 2005), Bill Bickel, review of The Lost German Slave Girl.

Historical Diving Society Web site, http://www.thehds.com/ (May 13, 2005), "Historical Diving Society Awards."

New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Web site, http://www.arts.nsw.gov.au/ (May 13, 2005), "The Premier's Community and Regional History Prize."

State Library of Western Australia Web site, http://www.liswa.wa.gov.au/ (May 13, 2005), "John Bailey," "Western Australian Premier's Book Awards: Nonfiction Category Winners."